"Look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the country. This is a role our nation has taken, " refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. This is not just."
The above quote is from Martin Luther King's sermon BEYOND VIETNAM - A TIME TO BREAK SILENCE, given in New York exactly one year to the day before King received a bullet to his brain.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
Click on the link above and read, or listen, to King's sermon that made headlines in bold print on newspapers around the world fifty years ago.
" and notice it is NOT addressed to the government but to the American people. (King gave this nightmarish sermon four years after his "I Have a Dream" speech, 'March on Washington.')
In this nightmare sermon, King dismissed his "government as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and anguished that he had not spoken out earlier, holding himself as well as all Americans responsible for 'atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 to maintain unjust overseas predatory investments.'
Martin Luther King's powerful sermon, notwithstanding, peace organizations, anti-war groups, progressive journalists, socialist historians, and people marching in protest all point a finger away from themselves and at their own elected and re-elected government and government officials, as if to convey the idea of their innocence of the genocide being committed in someone else's beloved country - in their name, in the name of all Americans.
Nowhere in the sermon does Martin Luther King say what the government should do, but instead what Americans, should do, and what Americans should stop doing.
Though King was a minister, very few clergy supported King's denunciation of the genocide in Vietnam. Yes, genocide. "So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers."
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